T-Shirts

The T-shirt is one of the most successful consumer items in American culture. Over one billion T-shirts are purchased annually in the United States. The popularity of the T-shirt stems from its capacity to convey information and from the fact that it can be produced rapidly and cheaply. The T-shirt was one of the first types of garments to communicate both verbal and nonverbal signals. Printing on shirts as a means of identifying the wearer with an organization, such as a sports team, appeared in the mid-nineteenth century and was being used by universities in the 1930s. The use of the T-shirt to communicate other types of information began in the late 1940s, when faces and political slogans appeared on T-shirts, and, in the 1960s, ...